Via WiscoDave, this trivial missive on the origin of rights by Alan Korwin at America Handgunner.
Was Thomas Jefferson wrong? Not about everything, just this: “Rights are unalienable.” If rights are unalienable, the Chinese people, all one-and-a-half billion of them, would be armed. Women living in oppressed countries would be free. In fact, all peoples would be free, and armed, and tyrants would be under the gun — not the other way around. Sorry, Tom, rights are not unalienable.
Rights are easily lost. That’s the truth. With apologies in advance to my wild-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool libertarian friends and their utopian ideals, your rights and your property are neither unalienable nor derived from the natural order of the universe. Your right to your life, your guns, and everything else you think you own is based on pure and raw power.
You own what you own because you can exercise dominion over it, you can demand it. The moment you lose or relinquish that power, or someone with greater power takes it from you, your home or your pencil is no longer yours. This is the ugly truth of life on planet Earth. Jefferson was wrong. What he said is nice, it has served us well in its own way, it’s just not the case.
This sounds like the Nietzschean will to power, with a dose of philosophical ignorance sprinkled in.
There is one commentary on this at Zelman Partisans, but I thought I would add by saying that rights have as their origin and basis the Almighty. The writer doesn’t even know against whom to turn his shots. Libertarianism has nothing at all to do with this, as they don’t ground rights in God’s law-word.
He is confusing the ground of rights with the recognition of those rights by the state. It matters in the extremum, because a man will answer for both his beliefs and his actions and behaviors in eternity.
If you believe that your rights have as their basis something other than the eternal, immutable law-word of God, that is a cosmic offense to your maker because He has ordered you to take every thought captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 10:5). Your beliefs matter that much. God cares what you think and believe.
He also cares what your “rulers” think and believe, and their actions don’t have an iota of effect on God’s decrees. Oh to be sure, that may mean war on your rulers if the oppression becomes severe enough, but it matters whether that is a just war, you see, because you will answer to your maker.
Eternity, and the state of your soul there. That’s why this is important. If a piece of paper, honored or not, is the basis for what you do, then you are to be pitied. But if the basis for what you believe and do is the Holy Writ, God is on your side, and there can be no better place to be, dear reader.